Texas Oil And `Bad-mannered Yankees`

April 29, 1986|By Joye L. Hash.

DALLAS — I feel compelled to respond to Bill Neikirk`s article ``Cap a well and starve a Texan.``

I agree with some of the points Mr. Neikirk had to make: Free enterprise should determine oil prices, not subsidization. I also agree that we should have reached some solution long ago that would free this country of its domination by foreign oil producers.

However, he expresses some views that are dead wrong. First, all people in Texas are not in the oil ``bidness`` and are just as much at the mercy of its fluctuations as the rest of the country. When you were waiting in long lines for gasoline, we were waiting in long lines, too--and not in gas guzzlers. (By the way, we usually pay more for our own natural gas than you do when it is piped to the Frost Belt.) As to ``luring`` Yankees to Texas--if he only knew the dismay with which we`ve watched this horde of latter-day carpetbaggers pour in over the last six to eight years, he would bite his tongue. They weren`t invited--they came because they weren`t eating too well in the North. Many of them came panting in hot pursuit of the ``streets paved with gold,`` ``overnight millionaires,`` etc.--myths which they get from watching too much TV.

We`ll make Mr. Neikirk a deal: Texans will find a Texas solution to Texas problems if he`ll take back all those bad-mannered Yankees who, as he said, should be living in the Frost Belt anyway.